{"id":15238,"date":"2023-03-01T01:19:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-28T17:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=15238"},"modified":"2025-01-14T00:20:45","modified_gmt":"2025-01-13T16:20:45","slug":"when-women-are-people-doesnt-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/when-women-are-people-doesnt-work\/","title":{"rendered":"when “women are people” doesn’t work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(original thread<\/a>, Mar2023) Sometimes guys say \u201cidk how to talk to girls\u201d and the ladies respond (understandably, but unhelpfully) \u201cyou know girls are people, right\u2026?\u201d \u2013 this is an eg of cultural confusion. Because what the guy is conveying is \u201cmy model of people is overtrained on male-male interactions\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

there are charitable and uncharitable ways to interpret each part of this; and for the whole thing to go well, every part needs to be interpreted by every agent at least semi-charitably. once someone thinks someone else is acting in bad-faith, it takes extra savvy to manage<\/p>\n\n\n\n

uncharitable read of man: \u201cI don\u2019t think of women as people\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

uncharitable read of woman: \u201cyour lack of training data & experience is a personal moral failure on your part\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d say ~95% of the time neither person means this, but low-trust environments makes people suspect it of others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

discourse around this stuff is tremendously focused disproportionately on the bad examples. someone might express a little frustration at the passing thought or felt sense of awkwardness in the negotiation, and then people who are Down Bad jump aboard and it gets sooo messy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

sometimes it can be fun to substitute other examples, just to see how it feels and plays out. eg suppose a Singaporean says, \u201cI don\u2019t know how to talk to talk to Americans\u201d. This feels unlikely in the general sense, because we are all trained on American media\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

but I feel around for it and I\u2019m like, oh, I don\u2019t really know the norms around tipping. we don\u2019t have that in our culture. does saying that I\u2019m nervous about tipping suggest to anyone that I\u2019m a bad\/selfish person? to most sensible people, no, because obviously I\u2019m an outsider…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

there are some interesting practices in women\/girl culture that some women might not realize is unique to women. A fun one I like to observe is the \u201csry I look like shit \/ no you look great!\u201d ritual. There are dozens of little things like this that lots of people take for granted<\/p>\n\n\n\n

bro equivalent is somewhat inverted, guy gets a black eye, his bros say \u201csomehow this improved the countenance of your goofy McDonald\u2019s lookin bugs bunny ass face\u201d (idk I\u2019m just riffing lol every friend group has a different vocabulary)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

anyway my rec to men who don\u2019t know how to talk to women is, as always, a cultural immersion in women\u2019s media. Crazy Ex Girlfriend is a nice place to start, but obviously no one piece of media is ever definitive of 4 billion people, just as no movie or tv show explains all guys<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and my rec to women who want to help dudes is to be gently curious. \u201cWhat do you worry about getting wrong? What do you find confusing?\u201d Etc. Some people call this emotional labor, which\u2026 I mean, sure- if u don\u2019t wanna do it, u don\u2019t have to. Nobody is obliged to help anybody<\/p>\n\n\n\n

tangentially: there\u2019s a useful concept called the Curse of Knowledge where some experts make for worse teachers than intermediates. because the experts have forgotten what it\u2019s like to be a beginner, so they give really vague and confusing instructions, which can even be damaging<\/p>\n\n\n\n

sometimes people do like to lord their knowledge over others like \u201cwtf how do you not even know this basic thing\u201d, which is\u2026 not great for a healthy public commons, which in turn is not great if we want more human flourishing<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and yes, occasionally there is a malicious bad actor who\u2019s down bad horrifically and is manipulatively \u201cJust Asking Questions\u201d with the intent of getting other people to perform for them<\/p>\n\n\n\n

that\u2019s sad but what\u2019s sadder is when the mere presence of bad actors cause decent actors to be unfortunately-yet-understandably suspicious of each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(og thread, may2020)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are lots of guys who spend their formative social experiences in male-only or male-dominant spaces. This leads to a confusion where \u201cbeing myself in public\u201d gets conflated with \u201cbeing myself around other dudes\u201d, and it leads to misunderstanding and conflict. I\u2019ll give an eg<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I saw a nerdy infographic in a group chat recently, and my first impulse was to type \u201cbro, nerdy infographics like this make my dick rock hard\u201d. (I didn\u2019t post it.) I\u2019ve been thinking about that impulse. I think it\u2019s a sort of bawdy male cameraderie move, like a sports ass slap<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sports ass slap actually is probably a useful analogy all the way through. Imagine a guy who only ever socializes by playing sports with other dudes, who all slap each other\u2019s asses cheerfully and laugh. And the first time he interacts with a woman, he slaps her ass<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are lots of other versions of this sort of phenomena. Consider the social rules around swearing. When is it appropriate to swear? When is it not? There\u2019s no centralised rulebook, but we all navigate it nevertheless, and mostly well most of the time<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My favorite example of mansplaining pic.twitter.com\/yrE6ZJhgeZ<\/a><\/p>— Visa is doing marketing consults (see pinned!) (@visakanv) February 13, 2018<\/a><\/blockquote>